British occupation zone in Germany

The British occupation zone in Germany was one of the four Allied zones created after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. It covered northwestern Germany, including the Ruhr industrial region, the major naval ports and most of the country's coastline, and held the largest population of the four zones. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepted the unconditional surrender of German forces in the Netherlands, northwestern Germany and Denmark on 4 May 1945, and the zonal boundaries were ratified at the Potsdam Conference that August. Britain later ceded the Saarland, the Palatinate and territories on the left bank of the Rhine to the French zone. The British Army of the Rhine was formed on 25 August 1945 with headquarters at Bad Oeynhausen, and by the end of that year some 800,000 British soldiers were stationed in Germany. The Control Commission oversaw denazification, local government and reconstruction, re-established Hamburg as a state and created Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. The zone ended in 1949 with the founding of West Germany.